What changed was that the layer in the middle was gone.
Not the layer that wrote status reports. Not the layer that ran standups and owned project timelines. That work was visible, trackable, and easy to argue either way. The part that disappeared wasn’t in any job description.
The Job Description Was Wrong
Middle managers managed. That was the job: deliverables, headcount, one-on-ones, escalation chains. Coordination. Translation between executive intent and team execution.
All of that is technically accurate. None of it captures what the function actually did.
Here is what the function actually did.
Before the weekly update went to the VP, someone read it and thought: not like this, not today. The VP had spent the morning in a difficult conversation about budget. The draft led with a delay. That was still true. But the manager rewrote the lead, buried the delay after the context that explained it, and sent a version that communicated the same information in a way the VP could receive without making a decision she’d regret.
The data didn’t change. What changed was the timing, the framing, the read of what the room could hold.
That’s not in the job description. None of it ever was.
The Relay and the Read
Gartner projects that 20% of organizations will eliminate more than half their middle management roles through AI by the end of this year. The argument, made publicly by executives at the top of companies that should know better: AI can model the information relay layer. Automated synthesis. World models. The pipeline from team input to executive insight doesn’t require humans to pass it along.
That’s true.
Here’s what’s missing.
There’s another problem, and it runs in the opposite direction. When you make coordination cheaper, you get more of it. Economists call this Jevons Paradox: efficiency improvements in a resource tend to increase total consumption of that resource, not reduce it. AI makes information synthesis cheap. That means more information gets synthesized, more decisions get surfaced, more edge cases get flagged. The middle layer that was filtering that volume before it reached the top is now gone. You haven’t reduced the coordination burden. You’ve removed the filter and increased the volume at the same time.
The relay was never the function. The relay was the visible part of the function. The part that isn’t visible ... the part that generates no artifact, produces no deliverable, appears in no report ... was something different.
Call it the room read. The calibration that happens before the message moves, not after. The decision about what gets escalated and what gets absorbed. The translation that runs in both directions: executive to team, team to executive, and neither in quite the language the other would have used.
No model is doing that. Not because models can’t read sentiment or draft contextually. Because the room read isn’t about information. It’s about relationship. It’s knowing that Marcus is defensive about this topic, that he’ll hear the framing as an attack even if it isn’t, and adjusting before anyone has to recover from the damage.
That’s not coordination. That’s judgment about people, in real time, invisibly, with consequences nobody tracks until the function is gone.
What Disappeared
When the layer comes out, a few things happen.
Executives start receiving signal that’s less processed. Not worse data. Less filtered data. Information that used to arrive shaped for context now arrives shaped by whoever wrote it, which is rarely the person who needs to read it. The volume stays the same. The interpretive layer that used to sit between sender and recipient is now the executive’s problem.
Teams start sending things up without calibration. Not because they got careless. Because the person who would have said wait, not like that is no longer in the structure. The 11 PM message that used to get intercepted, contextualized, and returned with a translation now lands directly. Sometimes it’s fine. Sometimes it causes exactly the problem it was trying to prevent.
And the things that never got escalated start surfacing: the whole point of the function, the ambiguity absorbed at the layer level before it became someone else’s problem. Because there’s no layer left to absorb them.
None of this shows up on any dashboard. It shows up in the postmortem, six months later, when someone asks why coordination has been so hard and nobody can answer.
What the Remaining Leader Now Carries
Flatter orgs can work. AI is genuinely useful in the relay portion of the function: aggregating updates, summarizing threads, surfacing patterns in data that would have required human review.
The question is what remains after the relay is automated.
What remains is the judgment layer. The room read. The calibration of tone before the message moves. The decision about what the team can hear right now, and what needs to wait, and what needs to be reframed before it reaches anyone at all.
That work doesn’t disappear when the org flattens. It migrates. It moves up to whoever is left. And the leader who thinks they removed a coordination function is usually in the middle of absorbing it themselves, without having noticed.
The new job description would say something like: receives unprocessed signal from multiple directions simultaneously, calibrates for relationship and context before transmitting, decides in real time what can be held and what needs to move, does this invisibly, continuously, without a title that names the function.
That’s what middle management was doing.
You don’t need a middle manager. You need someone who can take the signal before it becomes noise.
The title is optional. The function isn’t.
Resources & Further Reading
The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier (O’Reilly, 2017) — The clearest account of what actually changes at each management layer, written from the inside. The middle chapters are the ones worth reading twice.
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson (Stripe Press, 2019) — Treats the middle layer as a systems problem, not a headcount decision. Useful if you’re designing the replacement, not just arguing about whether to remove the layer.
This is part of the Execution Gap arc. Previously: The Delegation Illusion. Next: The Status Report Is Lying to You.
ZenOne also produces trance music. The mixing arc behind his productions is at zenonemusic.substack.com.